Visual communication principles and practice

¶ … Visual Culture: The Reader. Edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. New York: Sage, 2002.

According to Victor Burgin's rendition of photography, how do photography and text relate to one another?

Photography and text never simply stand beside one another. Rather, the two exist in dialogue. Burgin suggests that when a text and a photograph exist together, they create a new text that stands apart from the two, original products -- in other words, even if the two appear to be complementary on the surface, the two fused together create a new text and message for the reader of the photograph and text, a reader who is apprehending the photograph and the words simultaneously.

For Burgin, a photograph is a text in and of itself -- although an apparently frozen image, it too tells a story. Words create images in everyone's mind, but the words are different for every reader of a verbal text alone. For the reader of a photograph, the image is the same for the viewer's eyes, but the tone and texture of the tale told by the image, although quite influenced by the photographer's intent and composition, will vary for every consumer of the image. The dialogue of text and photograph, although it might attempt to clarify the verbal and visual text of a story or a moment in time, only creates different levels, depths, and possibilities of subjective meaning.

What does Roland Barthes mean by "a civilization of writing" and how does it relate to "a civilization of the image" based on his work "The Rhetoric of the Image"?

In his essay "The Rhetoric of the Image," Roland Barthes applies rhetorical or verbal constructs of language to analysis of different images. We live, says Barthes, in a society that is obsessed with the intellectual significance of writing. We are a verbal, recorded society. Yet the rhetoric of the image also suggests that we live in a civilization of images, where, like words, images possess connotative as well as denotative meaning. A word's denotation is its literal meaning. A words connotation is its meaning as it is located in culture. Words are specific and subject in their denotations of grammar in language, just as images are subject to the physical constraints of vision in their denotative meaning. However, words with similar denotations can have very different connotations, and likewise with images.

Barthes' essay "The Rhetoric of the Image" specifically centers on how word-and-images possess fused together, a unified kind of connotation that the word or the image would not possess alone. An image of pasta, for instance, with Italian words above the pasta might have the denotative meaning merely of the words in Italian, but the Italian quality conveyed in the connotation might be far richer, that of home, exoticism, and true authenticity of the food and experience of eating the food. After the purely linguistic message of the word, then, the consumer of the text sees a second, iconic literal message of the image, followed by the third is the symbolic message of the word and image fused.

Please explain how Susan Sontag describes aesthetic and instrumental attitudes toward photography.

According to Sontag, we as a culture are in a constant state of reading and being educated by photographic images. But this is not like being educated by painting or drawings. Photographs, she states, have taught us all a new visual code of understanding, changing cultural assumptions of what is worthy of our gaze as a society. Sontag applies a linguistic analysis to photographs, stating that the grammar and an ethics of seeing things in photographs creates a false suggestion of recording life, a sense that the world can be encapsulated with the eye. The nature of photography thus obscures the fact that there is always a person and a selective eye behind the camera, much as the selection that occurs in creating the text of a plastic work of sculpture or painting.

The photographer, even when using images of poverty, illness, or sickness to arouse compassion in the heart of the viewer to hopefully change the world, by showing the viewer pictures of 'reality' and 'real suffering' is still always deciding as a photographer how these heart-rendering images should look, as the nature of the photographic art requires the photographer to prefer one exposure to another and to impose standard of light, texture, and composition upon the subjects of photographs. This is also true even when non-artists take pictures of their family, creating unintentionally a new history in the photographs, rather than through lived experience.